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Wikis (Mona Jozi)
Why Wiki Works *A wiki is a body of ideas that a community is willing to know and maintain. That community has every right to be cautiously selective in what it will groom. This particular wiki has been blessed with thoughtful, diligent, diverse and open-minded volunteers, who have invested years learning what works here and what doesn't. When volunteers tire and depart, others take their place. I remain amazed that this works without mechanically enforced authority. Possibly it works because there is no mechanically enforced authority. In any event, I remain grateful to all volunteers, past, present and future. -- WardCunningham *Here you can rely on encountering playful minds. Putting up a wiki page is like tossing a ball of yarn into a basket of kittens. -- PeterMerel *There is, however, a strong commitment from the WikiCommunity to keeping the Wiki clean and nice. We all use Wiki, so we all try to maintain it in a usable state. *WikiWords are like ForthLanguage for English. WikiWikiWeb is the most naked embodiment of the HyperLink concept. *Any information can be altered or deleted by anyone. Wiki pages represent consensus because it's much easier to DeleteInsults and remove WikiSpam than indulge them. What remains generates new ideas by the interactive integration of multiple points of view. *Anyone can play. This sounds like a recipe for low signal - Wiki gets hit by the great unwashed as often as any other site - but FromFertilizerComeFlowers. Only good players have a desire to keep playing. *Wiki is not WysiWyg. It's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the VideoAddicts. If it doesn't appeal, they don't participate, which leaves those of us who read and write to get on with rational discourse. *Wiki doesn't work in real time. People take time to think, sometimes days or weeks, before they follow up some edit. So what people write is often well-considered. *Wiki participants are, by nature, a pedantic, ornery, and unreasonable bunch. So there's a camaraderie here we seldom see outside of our professional contacts. *So that's it - insecure, indiscriminate, user-hostile, slow, full of difficult, nit-picking people, and frivolous. Any other online community would count each of these strengths as a terrible flaw. Perhaps wiki works because the other online communities do not. *It's unstructured by nature. I've recently been trying to capture some of the fun my sister and I used to have as children in the computer games that I write. Over the years since we played in boxes, the games we played became more structured, more competitive, and less fun. Where once we created a world with words and imagination, I felt the need to impose order: double lines mean walls, single lines mean windows. It was once easy for me to make up my own games, but now it's not so easy. Wiki helps restore that freedom to make your own rules and follow them. Wiki is a world where anything is possible; the possible uses of the wiki were not dictated at its creation. There's a particularly big contrast with systems like FaceBook and MySpace which are very constricting: after using them for a while they start to feel like one of those games or puzzles in which the point is to do each thing exactly the way the designer wanted you to until you've finished, and then that's the end, at which point you throw them away and find another one.